Girls ‘Hannah’s Diary’: Here Comes The Bridge

The fourth episode of Girls moved the girls away from each other for most of an episode,and gave us some more material with the men on the show, all to very mixed results. There were a lot of odd choices made in favor of keeping long-term story arcs open, and some of them felt forced. Even though it was probably the weakest episode of the show so far, it manages to be watchable with some amusing scenes and an interesting – if a bit surreal – conclusion.

My biggest problem with ‘Hannah’s Diary’ comes from the male characters on the show. First of all, guys don’t talk like Ray. We just don’t. I’ve known some people who strung together questionable phrases, but never gone off on weird rants about incest behavior and sniffing my friend/bandmate’s girlfriends vibrator… right in front of his face. That, combined with Mr. Sexual Harassment Executive, made for two terribly weak portrayals of males. It comes with a bit of a trade-off: for once, Adam stops being a little bitch and faces the reality of a girlfriend who obviously hates him, and doesn’t want to have much to do with him outside of being comfortable.

Of course, this slap in the face comes in the form of a diary entry in Hannah’s journal, which Ray finds, reads, and brings to their sparsely attended show, where they both manage to alienate both Hannah and Marnie, bringing to head the rift we’ve been being teased with through the first three weeks (see: every ‘best friend’-type scene with Hannah and Marnie in the last three episodes). I’m not sure I like the way it was brought out – the song performance felt a little too cruel, even for a pissed off boyfriend and Ray, who apparently seems to be quite the sicko (or terrible archetype of the asshole dude).

Marnie is mostly left on the sidelines, to give us a creepy vignette at Hannah’s new job, where sexual harassment is accepted by the women there, because they get iPods and health benefits and stuff. If Dunham was trying to capture some comment about the male-dominated corporate world and her views of the women in it, it comes across very poorly, a jumble of scenes with two other females in the office who have some really questionable, cartoonishly archaic values on their value in the workplace.

The rest of the episode suffers from the same tonal dissonance: Jessa’s day with the kids doesn’t really seem to have a clear direction, or just a reason to show that she’s irresponsible and self-centered, something well established in her reaction to not being pregnant last week, and even her behavior back in the pilot. Even the one thing I do enjoy about her – and that’s her interactions with Shoshanna – feels underdeveloped, like there is so much more the two of them can learn from each other, instead of Jessa’s one-way chain of questionable advice to Shoshanna.

If there’s one character I enjoyed in ‘Hannah’s Diary’ it was Shoshanna, simply because Zosia Mamet is doing such a great job with a very typical ‘type A virgin’ character. She’s the recipient of the funniest lines in the episode, topped off with her insistence that she’s ‘totally not an attached bleeder.’ Sometimes, her dialogue is painfully constructed to be all Clueless-y, but Mamet manages to humanize it a bit with her on-screen charm. I may not like her character a ton, but I do like what Mamet is doing with what’s she being given to work with.

Finally, there’s Hannah and Adam, who’s undefined relationship gets even weirder with a long scene at his doorstep after he send her a ‘dick pic’ meant for someone else. In a single monologue, she goes from angry, to accepting, to sad, to passionate, all without Adam saying a single word. As soon as she opened her mouth about not seeing each other, and going on and on about what they are, it was clear she wasn’t really going to go through with it- not if Adam was going to make a move to keep her there. So Hannah is both accepting of sexual harassment at work, and of a fuck buddy who is barely paying attention to what’s coming out of her mouth?

Obviously their story is one of the seasonal arcs, like Shoshanna’s virginity or whatever is going to lead Jessa into the arms of the kid’s father. But in the process of trying to string along these plots for the whole season, the show is sacrificing some of its realism by stretching the plausibility of what these people would do. Either that, or they’re really trying to get us to hate these women. I guess we’ll have to see, but much of ‘Hannah’s Diary’ is an inconsistent half hour of comedy, funny in spots but unbelievable in a few too many others.

Overall: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

– characters being used as mouthpieces this week: Jessa, who tries to tell the other baby-sitters “I’m just like you.” Nobody’s really buying that.

– Shoshanna and Jessa are the show’s strongest combinations, but their interactions are too stilted and uncomfortable. I feel like these two would be perfect foils for each other, and I think they should play them towards a more symbiotic friendship then a condescending one.

– Hannah’s response to the second text from Adam? Weird, and a little unbelievable for how upset it made her.

– the eyebrow physical gag was mildly amusing… at best.

What did you think of ‘Hannah’s Diary’? Leave your thoughts/comments below!